


but he can't cough the water up

by gendernoncompliant



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Angst, Canon Temporary Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Motherhood, Spoilers, descriptions of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26980246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendernoncompliant/pseuds/gendernoncompliant
Summary: Zagreus is her son, but Persephone is no mother.
Relationships: Persephone & Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 29
Kudos: 330





	but he can't cough the water up

**Author's Note:**

> I know death as a general concept isn't particularly impactful for this set of characters, given how it lacks any real permanent consequences, but still--the idea of Zagreus dying at his mother's feet over and over really rattled me from the very first time I got past Hades and I wanted to write about it.
> 
> *Title from "My Mom" by Kimya Dawson.

Death means something different to a god—even a god of Persephone’s checkered origin. The well of life springs eternal and deep.

Mortality has no teeth.

(Except for when it does, and a child of flaming feet flickers to embers and runs cold—and for once in an unending string of lifetimes, death finally alights on her door. The Underworld is where the dead things go, and yet Zagreus’s cries cannot be heard in Erebus. Not in Tartarus or Asphodel or Elysium. For all his godly lineage, he was more mortal than them all.)

Olympus celebrates life even in its ending. The House of Hades tangles itself in ceremony and paperwork. Mortals mourn.

Persephone’s half-mortal lineage, perhaps, grants her room for grief. So, she grieves. She spends a great many years in mourning.

And then she sets the sorrow aside and forgets the House of Hades. She has to.

She carves for herself as mortal a of a life as a god can muster. She tucks into the space between, where nothing below nor above can touch her. She asks for precious little—a small plot of land, an unending pocket of sky.

It’s a humble life. (A lonely life.) But it’s hers. It’s golden and warm and unsullied by anyone’s immorality save her own.

She sings. She gardens. She watches Demeter’s eternal winter ravage the world just outside her doors. She pulls a yellow cat in from the cold during a particularly brutal season, when Demeter’s snow muscles past her gates. The spoiled thing still lives inside the cottage. He follows her into the garden and digs up seedlings before they have the chance to take root.

She settles. She finds comfort.

Sometimes Nyx passes through and they eat and laugh and speak of the distant past as if it were much closer. Persephone misses little of her old life, although she catches herself missing the life she was fated never to have.

Sometimes Charon moors his boat on her shores, and they sit by the water. He lacks for conversation, but she enjoys his strange and quiet company.

Often, she is alone.

But loneliness is a garb she’s well suited to. Olympus and the Underworld were both rife with too much noise and pettiness and expectation. Here, she is beholden to no one.

(Not even a son. Persephone does not consider herself the motherly type. Not after all these years. Not anymore.)

And then he’s alive. All at once, he’s alive and grown—the child she mourned, the only death that ever felt like one. She holds him in her arms and he’s warm and real and breathing.

She wants to know everything: the years she’s missed, the man he’s become. A tired corner of her heart even longs to ask after his father.

But there’s no time.

There’s no time for anything.

Zagreus buckles to his knees, hands pressed to his chest as if to staunch a wound she cannot see.

Persephone remembers her husband’s futile attempts to walk freely on the surface. Logically, she knows what she’s seeing, recognizes all the signs.

None of it matters, in the moment.

He’s her son.

He’s her son and he’s alive and the waters of the Styx lap at his feet.

Persephone paints on her smile even as her chest tries to fold towards a sob. It’s not enough time—they have nothing but time and still, it’s not enough.

She pushes back the threat of tears and takes his hand in her own. She will not send him off to the Styx in fear.

“I love you, Zagreus,” she whispers. His name feels strange in her mouth after so many years unuttered. She pushes the hair from his face as he gasps for air. “Find your way back to me.”

“I will,” he chokes, but the words twist and tangle, warp in his mouth. He sinks.

She sits alone in the wake of him.

For the first time in a great many years, this place she’s made for herself—this grove full of life and food and sunlight—seems cold and empty as a fresh dug grave.

She thinks she will be ready next time, but she isn’t. When pain distorts his face, her heart hammers against her ribs as though trying to break through her body to reach him. He fights against the pull of the river as it hisses against his flaming feet and climbs slowly up his legs.

She holds his hand. She smiles and sings and promises the moon.

“I’ll see you again,” she swears, although it is no more certain or steady than a hummingbird’s heartbeat.

He burbles with blood that isn’t even his own. She bears down on her grief like a steel trap. She won’t wear her sorrow in his presence. Her time with Zagreus is fleeting and precious and far too short for tears. But he dies.

He dies and he dies and he dies. In her arms. At her feet. Clinging to the iron bars of her garden gate.

All deaths are the first death. Each time leaves her a young mother again, holding her infant in the crook of her elbow, watching the orange flame of his tiny feet flicker to grey and gone. All grief is the first grief. The biggest, longest, most impossible grief.

A grief that she must wash from her face before he finds her again. And she does. She cradles her basket to her chest and weeps into the harvest. And when the weeping is done, she stands. Collects herself. Pushes back her greying hair and straightens her godly spine.

When next he sees her, she will be the picture of motherhood. Of warmth. She has given him so little throughout the many years of his life. She can, at least, grant him a gentle sendoff in a beautiful garden—can shield him just a little longer from the cruel underbelly of Olympus and the war that rages just below it.

She knows naught else to give him.

Persephone’s dreams of a family were stillborn with Zagreus.

(Zagreus is her son, but Persephone is no mother.)

Eventually, it becomes too much to bear.

She tells Zagreus not to come back. There are a great many reasons, some of them far bigger than herself or the broken little family she scraped together all those years ago. Should the gods on Olympus discover the truth, Demeter would invoke a wrath far worse than any mortal war or eternal winter.

But the far more present reason is a far more selfish one.

She cannot bear to watch him go.

She has known his death too many different times. She’s held him in her arms for each and every one. She cannot take it any longer.

Simply knowing he lives would be enough. It would be lonely with ache, but it would be enough. She could count him safe in the halls of Hades, under Nyx’s watchful eye. So, she tells him not to return to her.

He doesn’t listen.

Blessed with his father’s strength and her own stubbornness, he doesn’t listen.

Gods damn him, he’s a fool. And gods bless him, that he’s a brilliant, willful, wonderful fool.

He keeps coming back.


End file.
